Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Chronicling The Move

We're leaving Ann Arbor in just under a month. And we've arranged for the movers to pack and load the week before that. Which means every waking non-work, non-Sophie moment has been spent purging, packing, recycling, throwing, and donating. Having gotten rid of all the clothes we won't be taking with us, our next task was to tackle our books and papers. Between the two of us, Jude and I have clocked in 120 credit hours of coursework for our doctoral degrees, two prelim exams, and two dissertations. That's a lot of lecture notes, data printouts, assignments, journal articles, books, and copied book chapters. Oh and drafts of our dissertations. You should have seen the boxes of books we're setting aside to donate to Jude's school. Every year, they hold a book drive to raise funds for Alternative Spring Break (ASB). Basically, next year's ASB will pretty much be underwritten by us and our friend, Eric whose family is moving to Dublin in a few weeks too. And ever wondered how many trees two doctoral degrees kills? This is Cart 1 of two full shopping carts we had to take the the recycling bin.

I'm taking pictures of our house as we slowly (ok, maybe not so slowly) empty it out. These were taken before Jude and I got started this past weekend, so exactly a month before we leave:

Living room

Sophie's room/ Office

Basement

As you can tell, we've got our work cut out for us. We've actually already made quite some progress since-- closets have been trimmed of clothes we won't be taking with us, books have been packed away, and the filing cabinet in our monstrosity of a basement is now nothing but hanging folders. We'll be doing more everyday so watch this space for updates.